Instant ayatollahs vie for power

Wednesday

Aug 29, 2007 at 2:00 AM

Christoph Reuter

While Washington has been busy focusing on the divisions between Shiites and Sunnis that have led to nonstop sectarian violence in the country, the deep divisions within the Shia community itself have gone almost unnoticed.

Indeed, some say the competition among Shia clerics, each jockeying for power within the majority Shiite community, is the reason the current Baghdad government has been unable to create a political coalition that represents a broad cross-section of the country's population.

Nowhere is the rivalry being played out with more intensity than in the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

While former President Saddam Hussein was in power, Iraq's Shia majority was repressed, their political and religious aspirations crushed and their clerics kept firmly under the control of the state.

But with his ouster, the clerical establishment was able to take center stage in Iraqi life. And while Washington might have hoped that a central authority would emerge and exercise control over not only the general Shia population but also the important "hawzas" (Shia colleges and seminaries), something very different emerged instead.

Instead, there is constant turmoil as different factions struggle for power, with the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Badr militia of Ayatollah Muhammed Baqir al-Hakim, and the followers of Ayatollah Ali Sistani, regarded as Iraq's supreme Shia authority, all competing for influence.

In addition, a new type of Shia leader has emerged: self-appointed clerics who combine the might of armed militias with an almost messianic sense of purpose.

Among these "instant ayatollahs" is Farqad al-Qazwini, who set up his own hawza after being dismissed from the Najaf seminary, and Dhia Abdul-Zahra al-Garawi, who headed a group called the Soldiers of Heaven before being killed during a confrontation with Iraqi and U.S. forces near Najaf earlier this year.

But the most powerful, and some would say the most dangerous, of these figures is Sayyid Mahmud Hassani al-Sarkhi

Many in Karbala regard him as a serious threat to security and stability, and accuse him of being behind several successful and attempted assassinations of Shia scholars and clerics who have criticized him.

Largely unknown before 2003, Sarkhi now presides over the Sadiq Hawza, with more than 500 students, leads the Wala (Loyalty) political party and commands between 15,000 and 20,000 followers in various southern provinces of Iraq as well as an armed militia.

His followers have clashed repeatedly with Iraqi security forces as well as with supporters of other ayatollahs.

Born in the Hurriyah district of Baghdad in 1963, Sarkhi graduated in engineering from Baghdad University in 1987 and entered the Najaf Hawza in 1994, where Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, the father of the Muqtada al-Sadr, taught. Sarkhi declared himself an ayatollah four years later and was promptly dismissed from the hawza by the senior Sadr.

Most other clerics dismiss Sarkhi's theological credentials, but that hasn't stopped him from winning large numbers of followers, mainly among young people.

It is unclear where Sarkhi's movement gets its financing. His representatives insist most of the money comes from donations from his followers, although others suspect he receives support from Iranian or Syrian sources.

It is perhaps symptomatic of conditions in Iraq that his questionable claim to stand among the ranks of the ayatollahs, his isolation among other major Shia groups, and the outstanding warrants for his arrest have not stopped Sarkhi's inexorable rise.

Ahmed Jafar, a professor at Baghdad University's research center, sees the apparent impunity enjoyed by figures like Sarkhi as symptomatic of the failure of governance in Iraq.

"The decay of government power and order and the continuous fragmentation of Iraq have made it increasingly difficult to hold figures like Sarkhi accountable and bring them to justice," he said." No one is there to stop them."

Christoph Reuter is a journalism trainer in Iraq for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting, a nonprofit organization that trains journalists in areas of conflict. The organization's Web site is www.iwpr.net.